Ten of the National Pastime’s most honored and respected voices have been named as the finalists for the 2026 Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually for excellence in baseball broadcasting by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
This ballot will mark the fourth of four consecutive elections featuring a composite ballot of local and national voices whose broadcast careers have extended into, or began following, the advent of the Wild Card in 1994. This will be followed by a fifth year in the fall of 2026 featuring a ballot of candidates whose broadcasting careers concluded prior to the Wild Card Era. The cycle then repeats.
The ballot consists of 10 candidates, including a requirement that at least one candidate be a foreign language broadcaster.
The 10 finalists for the 2026 Frick Award are: Brian Anderson, Joe Buck, Skip Caray, Rene Cardenas, Gary Cohen, Jacques Doucet, Duane Kuiper, John Rooney, Dan Shulman and John Sterling. The winner of the 2026 Frick Award will be announced on Dec. 10 at baseball’s Winter Meetings in Orlando, Fla., and will be honored during the July 25 Awards Presentation as part of the July 24-27 Hall of Fame Weekend 2026 in Cooperstown. All of the 2026 Frick Award candidates are living except for Caray.
Criteria for selection is as follows: “Commitment to excellence, quality of broadcasting abilities, reverence within the game, popularity with fans, and recognition by peers.”
To be considered, an active or retired broadcaster must have a minimum of 10 years of continuous major league broadcast service with a ball club, network, or a combination of the two.
The 2026 Frick Award ballot was created by a subcommittee of the voting electorate that included past Frick honorees Marty Brennaman, Joe Castiglione and Bob Costas, and broadcast historians David J. Halberstam and Curt Smith.
Final voting for the 2026 Frick Award will be conducted by an electorate comprised of the 13 living Frick Award recipients and three broadcast historians/columnists, including past Frick honorees Brennaman, Castiglione, Costas, Tom Hamilton, Ken Harrelson, Pat Hughes, Jaime Jarrín, Tony Kubek, Denny Matthews, Al Michaels, Jon Miller, Eric Nadel and Dave Van Horne, and historians/columnists Halberstam (historian), Barry Horn (formerly of the Dallas Morning News), and Smith (historian).
The 10 finalists for the 2026 Frick Award:
• Anderson has called Brewers games on TV since 2007 and also has handled play-by-play duties for TBS since 2009.
• Buck called games for Fox Sports for 26 seasons as the network’s lead baseball announcer while calling games for the Cardinals for 17 seasons, broadcasting 24 World Series along the way.
• Caray called Braves games on TV for 33 seasons for TBS from 1976-2008 and was a six-time winner of the Georgia Sportscaster of the Year Award.
• Cardenas helped create the first Spanish-language MLB broadcast in 1958 with the Dodgers, working a total of 38 years for the Dodgers, Astros and Rangers.
• Cohen has spent the last 37 years with the Mets and currently serves as the team’s TV play-by-play voice on SNY.
• Doucet spent 36 years broadcasting for the Expos as the play-by-play radio voice on their French network (1969-2004), and he returned to the booth from 2012-22 as the Blue Jays’ French-speaking TV voice.
• Kuiper has called games for 40 seasons, including 39 with the Giants on both radio and TV following 12 seasons with Cleveland and San Francisco as a second baseman.
• Rooney recently completed his 39th season in a big league booth, having called games for the Twins, White Sox and Cardinals as well as Fox Sports.
• Shulman handled play-by-play duties for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball package from 2011-17 and called games on ESPN Radio prior to and after that, working postseason games from 1998-2022; he called games for Toronto Blue Jays from 1995-2001 before returning in 2016 to call games for Sportsnet.
• Sterling called Yankees games on the radio for 36 years before retiring in 2024 following stints with Atlanta’s TBS and WSB Radio, where he called Hawks basketball (1981-89) and Braves games (1982-87).
The annual award is named in memory of Hall of Famer Ford C. Frick, renowned sportswriter, radio broadcaster, National League president and MLB Commissioner. For a list of past recipients of the Ford C. Frick Award, please click here.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is an independent nonprofit educational institution, dedicated to fostering an appreciation of the historical development of baseball and its impact on our culture by collecting, preserving, exhibiting and interpreting its collections for a global audience as well as honoring those who have made outstanding contributions to our National Pastime. Opening its doors for the first time on June 12, 1939, the Hall of Fame has stood as the definitive repository of the game’s treasures and as a symbol of the most profound individual honor bestowed on an athlete. It is every fan’s “Field of Dreams,” with its stories, legends and magic shared from generation to generation.
